Observing the actuation of phonetic change through the evolution of multiethnic urban speech styles in the French media
Urban speech styles have been difficult to study systematically due to the rarity of large socially-stratified corpora. I present the results of a longitudinal analysis of variable liaison, schwa, and word-initial consonant realizations in a corpus of interview segments recorded with French artists who participated in the spread of global hip hop over thirty years in France. Results show that the omission of obligatory liaisons and the simplification of word-final consonant clusters became more frequent, while schwa realizations remained stable in thirty years. Conditioning factors, such as preceding and following phonetic contexts for schwa and lexical frequency in liaison remained significant and unchanged during the same period. The only change starting from the mid-1990s was the palatalization of word-initial /t/ and /d/ after high vowels. I discuss these results as a first step in gaining insights into the actuation and diffusion of phonetic variation in specific genres of public speech.
